Delete behaviour: is this not The Right Thing To Do?
 

Delete letter, delete letter, delete letter, delete project...

I think the status quo of this text-input behaviour is masking just how dangerous and subconsciously unsettling it is.

Yes OmniFocus supports Undo. But I could carry on working without realizing what I've done. Imagine if the Finder worked that way? Who's wishing it would? Imagine in Illustrator: delete object, delete (last) object, delete document and close window. I can't think of a single app that works this way, or a single instance where one would think, "Darn. I wish I could go from deleting text or an object to deleting all my work.

And no, it's not faster, it's slower. The gain of not requiring a modifier key can be measured in milliseconds, and even that's eclipsed the less obvious, but very real need to be careful as you delete text. I have to be careful about it, whereas if I had to hit command-delete, I'd be able to be more carefree within text boxes.

I don't mean to say there aren't valid counter-arguments, but to respond to one: it may uber-fast and l33t the way it is, (not that I agree) but you're a subset of OF users, are you not? Another: "Hm. Not hearing that complaint much." I think it's the kind of thing where users feel like they've done something wrong, and not that the application's constraints are wrong.

[QUOTE=paulduv;89696]Delete letter, delete letter, delete letter, delete project...

I think the status quo of this text-input behaviour is masking just how dangerous and subconsciously unsettling it is.

Yes OmniFocus supports Undo. But I could carry on working without realizing what I've done. Imagine if the Finder worked that way? Who's wishing it would? Imagine in Illustrator: delete object, delete (last) object, delete document and close window. I can't think of a single app that works this way, or a single instance where one would think, "Darn. I wish I could go from deleting text or an object to deleting all my work.
[/quote]
Well, I can think of some other apps that work that way with the delete key:

OmniOutliner, OmniPlan (though not OmniGraffle)

Other apps which have similar behavior in a line include Things and Mail, when editing tags and addresses respectively.

The Undo function is substantially more hazardous, in my opinion. At least you can see what the delete key is going to delete, whereas who knows what the Undo function will do (or did), and it will happily switch from undoing your typing a character at a time to undoing that creation of a project or moving something in the hierarchy. I'm hard-pressed to think of an app with a full Undo implementation that doesn't work this way.
[quote]
And no, it's not faster, it's slower. The gain of not requiring a modifier key can be measured in milliseconds, and even that's eclipsed the less obvious, but very real need to be careful as you delete text. I have to be careful about it, whereas if I had to hit command-delete, I'd be able to be more carefree within text boxes.
[/quote]
If you want to be fast and accurate at deleting text in appreciable quantities, the delete key doesn't seem like the way to go, except after you've selected the text to be deleted. I find that cmd-A then delete while editing a task name works great if I want to remove everything. Double-clicking to select the current word gets most of the other cases where I would want to hit the delete key several times. If I want to eliminate several words, click and shift-click to select the region to delete is faster and safer than the delete key, too.

Maybe what seems most natural is a matter of upbringing; coming from a text file world, the Omni behavior seems mostly as I would expect, and the notion of having to hold down a modifier to delete past the beginning of a line or field seems like unnecessary friction. YMMV.

I find the delete-key behavior a little odd, too. I haven't been using OF all that terribly long, and I'm certainly aware that I just need to get used to it. Still, I have this vague feeling when I use OF, that there are some small things that don't work quite the way I anticipate, none of them that important in themselves, but that perhaps add up to the all-too-common critiques: "OF's interface isn't that great", or "There's a steep learning curve."

The delete (backspace) key, when I'm working on individual actions, does this:
- Editing the action's title, delete text.
- When there's no letters left in the title, if the delete key is pressed again, delete the entry and select the LAST FIELD of the previous entry.
- Now press it again, select fields of that entry in reverse order until one with a value is selected, at which point the key switches back to letter-by-letter text deletion.
- Continue to loop through field select/text deletion/entry deletion.
- After I emptied my OF library in this way, the final press of the delete key seems to have erased my hard drive! The power of this application is phenomenal! :D

whpalmer, respectfully, this is outliner behavior, not the kind of activity I'd expect from a text file. I know that OF is grown from OmniOutliner, so this makes sense. I think part of my problem is that I have a mental model (coming over from Things) of my actions being "objects", not "lines" or "entries". As I said, I need some time to get used to OF's way. I just thought I'd throw in 2¢ about something I'm having trouble getting used to.

What I expect is more like:
- Delete text.
- When there's no more text to delete in a field, don't do anything, until I select the entry as a whole. Then delete the entry.
- After deleting an entry, either select the previous entry [i]as a whole[/i] so I can delete that too, or don't select anything.

The "select fields in reverse order until you hit text" is the weirdest thing for me to get used to. That's what Shift-Tab is for!

ADDENDUM: Let me note also when this behavior is "biting" me. When I edit an action's title, I finish typing the text I want, then I hit Return, because I'm done (I've tried Fn-Return, too; I'm on a laptop, and that's supposed to be Enter), and it creates a new action below, which I don't want. So then I hit delete, and I'm in in the last field of the task I just gave a title to. Not the end of the world, but not what I'm expecting, either.

[QUOTE=JF_Herschel;89900]whpalmer, respectfully, this is outliner behavior, not the kind of activity I'd expect from a text file.[/QUOTE]
If you have structured text in a text file, if you keep deleting, the very same thing happens. HTML, XML, C, Applescript, etc. — delete too far, you'll start munching on something else. But I think your comment about coming from Things illustrates my point about your background influencing whether you regard this as expected or unexpected behavior, no?

[quote=whpalmer4]If you have structured text in a text file, if you keep deleting, the very same thing happens. HTML, XML, C, Applescript, etc. — delete too far, you'll start munching on something else.[/quote]

Well, yes, but the same key doesn't go from deleting character by character, to deleting the enclosing form, to cycling through keywords and then deleting text again. In text processing, the Delete key generally disregards syntax -- it just goes a character at a time. In OF, if I put the cursor at the beginning of the title field of an action, the delete key changes what it does depending on whether there's text [i]after[/i] the cursor or not. If there is text after the cursor [i]in this field[/i], the delete key moves to the last field of the previous action. Otherwise it deletes the whole action, even if there's information [i]in the other fields[/i]. (Including, I just checked, the Notes field. I hadn't realized that until now. That's kind of a "Yikes!" to me.) XCode's Delete key, for example, doesn't delete the parameter list and return type if I do one press of Delete past the function's name in a C definition.

Like I said, the most unexpected (or the most spreadsheet/outliner like) thing to me is that sometimes it imitates Shift-Tab. If the Delete key is going to devour the nearest thing behind it that it can, why wouldn't it just skip over the empty Due and Start fields, and start deleting the Context character-by-character?

[quote=whpalmer4]. . .your comment about coming from Things illustrates my point about your background influencing whether you regard this as expected or unexpected behavior, no?[/quote]

Quite true, as I said, and I'm sure that I'll get used to it. It took me a while to learn emacs key commands, too, but I'm glad that I did!